Too Peaceful? Hey, It's Early

NEW YORK — It is too early in the tournament for Phil Jackson to get mad, and he can't get even until Tuesday night.

So, after his Bulls lost Sunday, the thinkingest coach in the NBA thought again.

The Knicks played hard, he said.

The Knicks played well, he said.

The Knicks played better than us, he said.

"Now," Jackson went on, "any questions?"

So peaceful, so composed, so typical. For all the time he and counterpart Pat Riley spent walking the floor in this opener of this series of the century, they could have shared the same chair. No chance there, of course, because these two great minds have spent too many hours trading jabs to stop sparring now. Everybody came to Madison Square Garden expecting a fight, and a basketball game broke out instead. Even Jackson and Riley agreed not to disagree on that.

But it's early. The presence of Jake O'Donnell, perhaps the league's fairest and firmest referee, militated against the prevailing circumstances of last May's free-for-all. Or perhaps it was mutual respect that produced communal jitters. Both teams turned the ball over too often to think about takedowns, chokeholds or drawing blood. Then again, maybe it was the realization that not everything seen Sunday was to be believed.

"Oh, that fallaway jumper by Anthony Mason, that was a designed play," quipped Riley, who had no right to look as dapper as he did. "We work on that in practice."

Scottie Pippen had fouled Mason on that sequence late in the fourth quarter, but not quite emphatically enough to prevent a continuation and a prayer and a swish. On the Bulls' bench, Jackson saw that and wore a bemused expression, much as he did while viewing a succession of three-pointers canned by John Starks. He was supposed to put the lights out on the Bulls, but not this way. Starks was all the uncommonly cold Michael Jordan could handle, and more. Who's guarding whom?

"They shot 55 percent, and we shot 44," said Jackson, who seemed as wrinkled as Riley did freshly pressed. Somewhere, Jackson would have to find an antidote up those long sleeves of his, as he has done so often. It was Jackson, following two straight world championships, who conceived this notion of pacing the Bulls toward a third. The strategy drew criticism, especially when the Knicks accumulated all those floor burns while crafting the Eastern Conference's best record, and with it, the ultimate prize: home-court advantage against the Bulls.

The Knicks held serve Sunday, but Jackson knows no panic. It's unrealistic to go undefeated in the playoffs, and it's much too late to solicit any support for coach of the year, because that man is Riley. Jackson might have to hear the recurrent hymn that if Jordan isn't on fire, the Bulls will crash and burn. Riley touched on the subject ever so gently in the postmortems. He noted that Jordan bagged his 27 points while Pippen collected his 24, but, geez, the rest of the Bulls weren't all that involved in the offense. Then, however, Riley backed off.

"The story of the game," he stressed, "was on the boards. Our ballhandling was shaky, but our rebounding overcame our mistakes. Do I feel fortunate that Jordan didn't play as well as he usually does? You never feel fortunate in a playoff game."

And so it went. All that prefight hype wasted. Or, at least, postponed. Jackson had been in such good throat, too. Utterly voteless in the balloting that rendered Riley king, Jackson was hardly speechless. He chided the Knicks' clutch-and-grab style in no uncertain terms. Not only is it accepted and condoned, Jackson said. It is honored. Take that, Coach of the Year. And Riley did, with the sideswipe that "Phil doesn't know how I teach or what I teach, and unless he saw me teach something in practice to embellish what he's claiming, then I don't think he has any cause for saying it."

But that was before, and now is now. Knicks 98, Bulls 90, and if it wasn't all finesse, it wasn't fists, either. Which doesn't mean war as advertised has been averted.